The girl accompanied evening into Garrus' office. Soft as the moon, she spilled into the room with the wispiness of waning energy, lit up by the burning fluorescence behind her. He waited for a blue-dressed guard to follower her inside, or even just to salute him from behind her and carry on with their duty, but she was alone.

Something pulsed red in the corner of his vision. It made his nerves tense, his muscles stiffen. With it came an itch that tightened his trigger finger into a C-shape until it had folded into itself, becoming square and safe. His other fingers followed suit until his hand clenched into a useless fist. The girl was not a threat; the red was her heartbeat. The red was something like fear.

What occurred to him next wasn't the frailness of her body, or the darkness of her hair, or the lines that etched too deep into a face as young as hers. It was that she was someone important, or knew something important. The building where he worked was more of an enclave than a neatly stacked arrangement of offices. Security was notoriously tight – so much so that people joked that if a leaf were to blow in from outside, it would have to pass five levels of clearance before it could be swept back out. On a normal day, this girl wouldn't have made it past the driveway without five snipers staring her down through crosshairs. But there she was, alive with a beating heart, so he had to at least humour her.

"Hey. You Garrus?" she said as soon as the door whooshed shut.

"For about another ten minutes. After that I'm off for the day."

"Not that you asked, but I'm Lisa. I can work with ten minutes."

"Right."

"I don't know if they told you about me."

"They?"

"They. The people I talked to? The council? Looks like that's a no though."

"It's a no," he said, his words slowed. There was nothing simple about the council. At times, Garrus would rather wrestle a thresher maw armed only with his own adrenaline than deal with the tightened shoulders, short words, and blind ideologies of the galaxy's chosen ones. That they gave this girl an audience worked its way beneath his skin, though he couldn't pinpoint precisely why. Maybe because they had neglected to warn him to expect company. Maybe because it usually took him a month to get either a yes or a no out of them and he worked for the assholes. Or maybe the source of his irritation was Lisa herself, who was moving through the room like she was unsure how to exist within its walls. Lisa and her purpose, and the cold dread that settled on him as he wondered exactly how much more she was going to cost him than the promise of a quiet evening alone.

When she reached his desk she pulled a datapad from inside the folds of her jacket and crossed her arms over chest, tucking the pad behind her elbow. "So there's this woman," she said. "On Omega – that's where I'm from. Calls herself Jo. Won't give us anything else to know her by. Just that. Jo."

"Makes sense," he said. "Most people go to Omega to disappear. Names just complicate that."

"Yeah, right, exactly. She showed up right around the end of the war, you know, like a lot of people. Nobody asks why – the stories are never good. Anyway, somehow she found us."

"Us?"

Lisa looked away, wet her lips with the tip of her tongue. "Street rats. Urchins. Piss. Don't know what your kind calls us these days."

"To be honest, it doesn't come up much," Garrus said.

If that bothered Lisa, it didn't show; she rolled it off her shoulders with a shrug and said, "Don't know if that's better or worse."

"There probably aren't many good options out there."

"Nah."

"So...?"

"Right. So one of the kids got himself killed. Real bad. Jo … I don't know. It messed her up."

There was a throb in Garrus' head, right behind his brow. Grief counselling wasn't something he believed he could manage, even if he'd had to work a sense of calm into more broken people than he wanted to think about. And he wasn't an assassin – or a Spectre. There were better people to go to for reassurance or revenge; people with more experience, more surety, more to gain, less to lose. All he had was heart, and really, where had that landed him? In a small office on the Citadel. Sharing his evening with a girl he didn't know and a project he knew he didn't want to undertake.

"Can you get to the point, kid?"

"Yeah, sure. We tried to talk to her but she played it like there was nothing wrong. Or – of course there was something wrong, she didn't just lie about that, we're not fools and she knows it, but she wouldn't talk to us, even to say she was having a hard time. So I got to thinking that maybe someone from whatever life she had before might be able to, I don't know, do something. Anything. And I found a person who knew a person who could get me in with Aria. I figured she could help me figure out who Jo was since she's got all those people working for her. Turns out she already knew her."

"So who was she?"

"I don't know. Aria wouldn't tell me. Nobody would. But she said you'd know." A crooked, awkward sort of smile played at the corner of her lips and she unfolded her arms to offer Garrus the datapad. "I've got some pictures. Everyone told me to keep them classified, I think it pissed off the guards but whatever," she said, with the nervousness of a child offering a present to a distant father. "You can just look at them though, it's cool."

Garrus took it from her, flipped through its album. At first without trepidation. Then with the slowness brought upon him by a pair of useless hands that refused to stay still, their nerves scorched by a flame of red hair.

There she was, surrounded by children, playing hopscotch on a pattern of water lines; there she was again, exchanging presents beneath neon lights. Again, curled up asleep with a toddler. Again, photobombing two smiling boys. Again, letting a group of batarian children do her hair. And again, and again, and again.

Lisa didn't have a way to sense his heart rate. She couldn't read the nuances of his thoughts as his mind slowly curled up on itself, and she couldn't accurately measure the gravity settling on him with the weight of seven years of loss. Taking a step closer she said, needily, "Will you help?"

Guilt and anger and relief boiled behind his eyes. Those photos weren't for him to look through; that woman wasn't for him to see again. Yet there she was in the palm of his hands, and here Lisa was, standing in front of Garrus, telling him otherwise.

Where was he though? He didn't have a damned clue. He wanted to yell at Lisa until she left, and he wanted to pull her into his arms until he cried and keep her there until he stopped. He wanted to refuse her request. To tell her that the right to that woman's company had been stripped from him in a manner that made it unconditionally final. But the woman in the photos was her and he was himself, and only together were they Shepard and Vakarian, so he wanted to say yes, too.

For the longest time he said nothing. Lisa said nothing. Or maybe she did. The Citadel could have collapsed around him for all he knew, for all he cared, for all he could consider without his mind snapping like a twig beneath all this new growth of thought.

Would he help? Could he help?

Did he want to help?

Shit, he didn't know.

"Get back to me on this tomorrow," was all he could manage.